


In The Pantomime

by orphan_account



Series: The Show Must Go On [1]
Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Did anyone even tell the actors?, Gen, Gratuitous use of a Midsummer Night's Dream, outsider pov, seriously why do people not talk more about why they picked that particular play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 09:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15312537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She touched the corner of her eye with the tip of her ring finger. No sense in crying.After all, she hardly knew him.





	In The Pantomime

She goes to the wrap party because there was nothing else she could do.

She wears pink, because this isn’t a funeral, they weren’t invited to the funeral — _if any of you vultures_ _come near my son again ill kill you_ — and anyway, this isn’t it. She layers her eyes dark and heavy and smears rouge on the center of her mouth. Makeup for the stage. Heavy makeup for when people were looking at you. Her lipstick smells sweet like lead.

The day before yesterday, she’d helped him glue twigs back onto his glove.

She’s early. The theater is cold and empty when she arrives, icy blue walls stark against the dark seats. It’s a delicate color. A frail color, like wisps of dawn blowing away in the needling wind. A gutted record player spins silently on the stage, around and around and around and around and around.

The waiting dregs of the party stir their heads like crushed grass. Mrs. Heikel sits on the edge of the stage, the heels of her pumps clicking the siding, staring off into the front row like it’s the end of the world. Her throat burns, bile rising in her throat.

_The thrice three Muses mourning_

Her dress is pink and gauzy and wraps around her arms exactly like her costume, exactly like the finicky shoulder strap that had to be pressed down every rehearsal because she kept picking at it even when he called her on it. It must have shrunk in the wash because it feels a size too small, a satin cage around her chest. She can’t breathe.

All of a sudden, she just wants to go home.

She goes stage left instead, heels clicking past the tape marks on the floor and flips over the lid to the storebought brownie bites there, the plastic tumble loud in the air. Why couldn’t there be projection like this when they were performing? The tray is untouched. The lid lands back with a deeply unsatisfying rattle.

He’d appeared out of nowhere, some stupid Welton boy in his tie and his shoes like he was already a banker or a doctor or a professor, cruising in on a borrowed bike and stealing the show at 4:00 every afternoon. His stupid hair hanging in his stupid face.

_What, a play toward! I'll be an auditor; An actor too,_

Her hand trembles into her bag, pulling out a light and flicking a slim cylinder from its pack. She cups it to her mouth and dares Mrs. Heikel to call her on it. No one says anything.

She hadn’t even known him. He was a friend of her parents’ friends’ son. Four degrees of separation. A practical stranger. Except that he was here, every day, at 4:00, and worked magic. Smoke hisses up from the stage, disappearing somewhere among the wooden clouds scudding along the ceiling.

She shifts her weight, aching in her heels even after a few minutes. Her bones have been replaced with lead. The piano stares at her from the opposite corner of the stage, ivory and black keys blinking slowly — _oh won’t you play, all welton boys play I can’t I dont know how oh come on please well alright_ — in the light.

Helen Crowther stands up and leaves, soft shoes even softer on the aisle carpeting, ducking out the doors into the bright winter sunlight. She walks forward, standing center stage, and looks out across the audience, the invisible roar of them like the ocean, like a hurricane in the trees. She’s unbearably relieved that she pushed him forward while bowing. If that was the only ovation he ever received, she’s glad he took it standing.

She finds herself in one of the balconettes, overlooking the stage, the soft scarlet glow of the _exit_ sign pulsing gently in the back of her head. He’d been happy. She knew that. Brilliant blinding smile and whoops like an air siren, peeking past the curtain to see the audience even when Bridgit hissed at him for it.  

_look you arm yourself to fit your fancies to your father's will_

She wants to hate him, hate him for what he did. The punch bowl cries pathetically in the corner, dripping sweet pink tears of condensate down its sides, and no one can even bring themselves to speak. A whole room of silent actors. Now _that_ was a feat.

He had been Puck. He had been a giant.

She takes a drag of her cigarette.

She had kissed him, just the once, at curtain call, her mouth on the corner of his and it had felt like this: nicotine sliding down her throat, hot and dry and shapeless like smoke.

He hadn’t kissed back. She wondered if he knew by then.

She wondered if this had been his plan all along.

_Already to their wormy beds are gone; For fear lest day should look their shames upon_

Had he been waiting for opening night?

_willfully themselves exile from light_

He’d been Mrs. Heikel’s favorite, after only a few weeks.

_And we faeries Following darkness like a dream, now are frolic_

Fuck you, Neil, she thinks. Fuck you.

_Tide life, tide death, I come without delay._

The belltower sounds from far outside, deep and distant, and she finds herself counting them, eyes involuntarily watching the door. One. She hears Mrs. Heikel stifle a sob from the stage. Two. Her hands creak on the bannister, pale against the knotty wood. The door seems to take on more detail the longer she looks at it, like her eyesight is improving, like she’s imagining things. Three.

Oh god, she hopes the past two days have been nothing but a dream. A midwinter fever dream. She hopes it with everything present in her soul.

Four.

No one comes through the door.

_Ho, ho, ho! Coward, why comest thou not?_

It stays stubbornly closed. Mocking them.

_This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad._

He’s late.

She stands up straight, rooting down through her heels like she can access the center of the earth if only she tries hard enough. The cigarette burns itself out slowly against her fingers, scattering ash over the railing like sooty rain. Mrs. Heikel sobs below. She wonders if the teacher will be fired like that Keating over at Welton. She wonders if she’ll ever direct again.

She walks down the hidden staircase, polished nails dragging slightly on the bannister varnish. She emerges deep in the shadow of stage right. Looking over the abandoned audience, her stomach tightens, the phantom hot high thrill of performance. She feels the ghosts of pins in her hair and a scratchy strap at her shoulder. She feels the brush of the twigs on her face.

She steps towards the exit.

There, center stage where he beguiled Titania.

There, the balconette where he led Demetrius and Lysander in a dance.

There, where she saw him alive for the last time.

 

Who was he to her?

He was nothing. He was a Welton boy. She’s known so many Welton boys.

He was good. He was really, really good.

The urge to say something, Sonnet 55 or the ending of the Tempest or a line from Hamlet, rises hot and thick in her throat. She crushes it. Flicks the end of her cigarette away onto the stage and stamps it out with the point of her heel. Words aren’t right. She’ll leave that to the Welton boys. To Keating, the teacher. To the empty principles and hollow fathers in the church. To him, and his beautiful epilogue.

For now, she’ll hold him like smoke in this delicate room.

She leaves the stage and doesn’t look back. She can hear Chet idling his expensive sports car for her, ten dollar exhaust vanishing in the wind. She knocks smartly on his window, sliding in across the real white leather, the slick metal roof biting her hands with cold, and shivers.

“That was a bust,” she says. Chet hardly even looks like her brother, he’s so bundled up behind his sunglasses. Abruptly, she remembers that he was a Welton boy. There’s nothing of it left in his face, erased by the rough hand of Ridgeway. She coughs. Her throat is hard and scratchy from the cigarette.

“Let’s go get drunk.”


End file.
